Metacompetition: Competing over the game to be played

Abstract

Strategy research often studies competitions among organizations and defines the winners of these competitions as “great.” But we typically treat as a given the specific formal and informal rules of the game, the logics, that govern these competition. Yet the logics governing competitions themselves are decided through a higher-level “metacompetition” with other possible logics. Metacompetitions determine who can compete, how they can compete, the criteria that will be used to evaluate success and failure, and the payoffs to competition. When we ask “where do great strategies come from” but ignore metacompetition, we take as a given the very process that gives us the rules by which we determine greatness. In this paper I argue that to understand where great strategies come from, we must first understand how metacompetition determines which logics prevail in a market. I develop an ecological model of metacompetition, and I estimate the model using data on metacompetition in the digital music distribution industry.